


Both Sides of the Mirror

by hangingfire



Category: The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:31:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/pseuds/hangingfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world of Special Circumstances is full of unintended consequences. Surprisingly, this is not inherently a bad thing, even if the ethics of the original action were questionable in the first place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Both Sides of the Mirror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cordialcount](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/gifts).



> "We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us."  
>  -Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"

 

Iyana came in through the back door and washed her hands at the kitchen sink. She took her time scrubbing off the garden dirt, and without turning around said, “Hello, Diziet.”

The taller woman unfolded herself from the alcove where she’d been sitting. “Iyana.”

Iyana remained facing the sink, watching the water run over her hands. Her deep brown skin was darkened nearly black by hours she spent in the sun, her palms and knuckles coarsened by vegetable field, by axe and hoe. “Got the suitcase with you?”

“Skaffen-Amtiskaw stayed on board the _Take a Picture_. This won’t take long.”

Iyana turned off the water, dried her hands and turned around at last, folding her arms. “So. Yanari’s dead.” Because why else would Sma be here? Her stomach felt hollow and churned up with nausea, something she hadn’t expected. “How dead?”

“Really dead.” Sma looked like she’d found something very interesting in the cobblestones of the kitchen floor. “I’m sorry, Iyana.”

“Well.” Iyana locked her fingers behind the back of her neck. “I’m sorry too. I know she was a good agent.” Not like they’d been in touch, but from what Iyana remembered, it was true, and probably was true up until the day Yanari died.

“She wanted you to have this.” Sma put a small matte-silver cube down on the cutting block table. “It’s her mind-state backup, from her neural lace.”

“She wouldn’t want to be reactivated,” Iyana said quickly.

“I know. She won’t be. We’re taking her wishes very seriously on that.” A ghost of a wry smile crossed Sma’s face. “That’s why I’m bringing it to you. Also, she had it made such that you—and only you—can review the memories through a link-up without actually activating the personality construct. If you wanted to.”

Iyana picked up the cube and turned it over in her hands. Such an innocuous-looking thing; she wondered if it was her imagination or if it really was unusually heavy for its size. “Well. That’s...” She trailed off, unable to find the words to express the turmoil she felt. After a moment, she finally said, “Thank you.”

“You don’t mind keeping it?”

“No, of course not. I’ll take good care of it. Her.”

“All right. It’s good to see you, Iyana.” She glanced around the kitchen. “Child?”

“Children. Three, actually.” Which was a bit excessive by Culture standards, she knew.

 Sma shook her head, but she was smiling. “I hope they make you happy.”

“They do. So does their father.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” A brief, awkward silence, then, “I’ll be on my way. Be seeing you?”

“Sure.” Pure politeness and not actually true. Iyana didn’t dislike Sma, but on the general principle of a quiet life, she didn’t want to see hide nor hair of a single Special Circumstances agent ever again if she could help it.

“Take care, Iyana.”

“You too, Diziet.” Letting Sma walk herself out wasn’t the polite thing, maybe, but the little cube on the table seemed to exert a pull that Iyana couldn’t quite escape.

 

Iyana had met Yanari for the first time twenty-five years ago, at the end of what was planned as a six-month bog-standard assignment—land in the Netchay system, meet an old contact, help him re-negotiate a peace treaty, get out. But then everything blew up in SC’s collective face and it turned into a hideously bitter and ugly four-year slog. No one who got the mission brief could entirely blame Iyana—who at that point wasn’t yet going by that name—for wanting to quit. She’d almost gotten killed too many times, seen far too many people die terribly—even by the standards of an SC job, it was unusually bad.

When they finally met face to face, neither one knew what to say for a long time. Finally the silence was broken by, “I’m changing my name, just so you know.”

“Well ... that’s ... good?” Yanari winced. “I mean—okay. That’s—it’s your decision. What to?”

“Iyana. Full name, once I get resettled, to be Juboal-Davienetchsa Iyana Kerr Restil dam Khassen.” She grimaced a little at the mouthful and Yanari snorted. Culture nomenclature, while elegant, could be terribly long-winded.

“Iyana.” Yanari spelled the name out in her head. “I see what you did there.”

“Don’t treat it like a cheap joke, because it’s not.”

“I know. I’m sorry. And I’m really sorry you’re in this position.”

“Don’t be. They’re the ones who put us here, after all. I’m never going to understand their need to call on _specific_ people.”

“Well, there was the history there.” Yanari shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Still, it—don’t take this the wrong way, but I wish this could have been done some other way.”

“It’s okay. I know what you mean.” Iyana shrugged, then smiled. “Don’t worry about it. I won’t even mind if you contact me, you know. Though if it’s too weird, I understand.”

“I—sure. Thanks.” Pause. “No hard feelings?”

“No hard feelings.”

The next day Iyana departed on the GCU _Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer_ , which took her to her new home on a quiet, rural plate where the inhabitants had decided to take up farming. Farming! Yanari had been unable to hide her shock, which Iyana found funny. Their farewell was awkward—uncertain of whether a hug would be appropriate, they settled on a handclasp instead—and as it turned out, final.

 

The first thing Hallis did when he came in from the field was to succumb to instant curiosity and pick up the cube to look more closely at it. Iyana surprised both him and herself by practically slapping it out of his hand.

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked, once she’d explained what it was.

“I thought about burying it,” she said. He looked at her to see if she was joking, but she absolutely wasn’t. “Or having it Displaced into the star.”

“A funeral?”

“Sort of. No. I think I just want to remove the temptation to look. Neither of us wanted that kind of direct memory-access thing while we were alive; I don’t see why that should change now that she’s dead.”

“Maybe she had something to tell you.”

“I doubt it. I think she just wanted to stay out of SC’s hands. And that much she can trust me with.” She put the cube on a high shelf, and it was nearly a year before she thought about it again.

 

She accessed it on impulse one night after Hallis and the children had gone to bed, wondering if he was right and maybe there was some kind of message buried for her in Yanari’s memories. She selected a very specific incident: a brief mission—practically a heist—to Yanari’s original homeworld of Khassen.

The Culture wasn’t involved directly with Khassen, though they were in diplomatic contact. When Yanari had still been a citizen there, decades ago, she’d had a different name and a somewhat different face as well. She never knew how or why SC decided to pick up the pieces that had survived the bombing of the Secret Service offices, and she had decided that she would never ask. She’d been reluctant to go back to Khassen, and much had changed in the intervening years, but this job—the retrieval of a Culture data-core from a professional thief—needed quick doing, and her prior knowledge of the capital city cut down the SC prep time considerably.

Stepping into the memory, Iyana felt a sensation of subtly altered proprioception, and the discomfiting noise of another’s thoughts laid over top of one’s own. She tried to move her limbs, but of course she couldn’t, since in the memory they weren’t hers to move. After a while, she relaxed, and then it was like being carried along in a particularly lithe transport, with a tour guide who muttered to herself constantly between shouting a lot.

What struck Iyana, as she reviewed the events, was how much _fun_ Yanari seemed to be having—the stealth, the break-in, the daring escape, the frantic transport-chase into the desert. She worked out the timing afterward and figured that this particular adventure had happened right around the same time Iyana’s oldest child Catalya was being born.

I could have been rappelling down the side of a high-rise in Doubei instead of feeding babies, Iyana thought. Of course, she knew damn well from her own experiences that SC wasn’t all glamourous heists and high-flying adventures—but for the first time in twenty-five years, she found herself wanting the rush. But there was a field that needed weeding and thinning, and so she forced the thought out of her mind and put the cube away.

 

It was another two years before she felt the desire to pick up the cube again, and this time she was a little tipsy, after one of the long parties the collective threw after the spring planting had been completed. Which was probably why she decided to go back to the beginning. Her beginning.

Yanari Restil was in the midst of negotiating an extremely delicate peace between warring tribes on a particularly barbaric Stage Two Uncontacted world. Unannounced and unexpected, Sma’s drone showed up in her tent one night, stating that she was  desperately needed to help the Netchay arbitrator Soolis tath Marj—with whom she’d been close—re-negotiate a treaty they’d arranged twenty years previously.

“Impossible,” she said. “For one thing, if I leave here, that’s a half a decade of hard work down the shitter, and since I can’t be in two places at once—”

“Well, as a matter of fact...” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, and explained that this was actually entirely possible, by way of an artificial avatoid and a mind-state download. Simple, really.

She’d insisted on seeing the avatoid before it was dispatched on its assignment. Sma didn’t want them to meet face to face—“some people do, but they’re more used to it, and I think it’s better that you don’t deal with that just yet”—and so Yanari was brought to a balcony overlooking one of the GSV’s parks, where the avatoid was sitting on a bench, reading the briefing she needed to get up to speed with Soolis.

Yanari recognised her own dark skin, curly reddish-black hair, and stocky build—though the avatoid seemed slimmer than the figure Yanari saw on the mirror. Somehow, it didn’t seem all that strange until the avatoid reached up and ran her hands through her hair, with a peculiar twisting gesture that made Yanari’s own hands tingle from the specificity of it, the exact reproduction of her own unconscious movements. She turned away and took a few steps away from the balcony railing.

“Going to be okay?” Sma asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine, I’m just—” She rubbed her forehead. “Does she know? What she is?”

“Of course. It’d be unethical otherwise.”

Yanari began walking, no destination in mind, just trying to get away. “What happens to her when she’s done with Soolis?”

Sma fell into step beside her. “She comes back, gets a debrief and a download. The avatoid goes back to base mode.”

Yanari stopped in her tracks. “You mean she dies? Does she know this? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“It’s not death. She’s a temporary extension of your own consciousness, and her experiences will be re-integrated to your own. Yanari, I’ve done this several times myself. It’ll be all right.”

“Maybe for you,” Yanari said. She started to run her hands through her hair and stopped, wringing her hands. “She’s not going to want to be ... re-assimilated.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s _me_ , Sma. Of course I know.”

Yanari was right, of course. Maybe it would have been different, Iyana thought, if the Netchay job had lasted the six months or less that SC had originally projected. But by the time the whole fiasco was complete, there was no question of re-integration. Iyana—still also called Yanari then, but she’d already devised her new name well before she met her progenitor—had changed too much, and Yanari was not comfortable with integrating four entire years of life-changing chaos. Iyana’s mind-state was transferred to a new, fully biological body; they met, they agreed, and they separated.

 

All the existential dread that Iyana had been keeping at bay for years came rushing back, and she was in a bad mood for nearly a week afterward. Only a few people knew the full story of what she was—she’d told Hallis before they first slept together, because not telling him felt deceptive. She was shocked that it hadn’t bothered him at all, and indeed none of the handful of people who knew her story treated her as anything but an ordinary person.

But she still had the memory of a Khassenite religious upbringing, where she would have been condemned as an abomination at worst, a serious scientific ethical problem at best. And the fact that it was Yanari’s memory of that upbringing, and not one that Iyana herself had lived, made her mood even worse. She had bad dreams about looking at herself in the mirror and seeing Yanari look back, surrounded by the accoutrements of her SC agent’s life. She put the cube away again, and didn’t touch it for another five years.

 

She wasn’t sure, later, why she decided to review the memory of Yanari’s death. Morbid curiosity, perhaps, and a vague sense of a debt owed. After all these years, Iyana had never been able to shake the annoying sense that she had Yanari to thank for her home and her family. Perhaps she just needed to convince herself that she’d made the right choice in stepping away from SC—in continuing her existence at all.

So she set up the link and dropped into a memory of lightheaded exhaustion, terrible pain, and resignation.

Hadn’t there been that one guy, Yanari thought, the one with the funny name, one of Sma’s people from five or six decades back or however the hells long it was? He’d lost his head on that planet, what was it called, Falls, Fowls—really lost his head, literally; they’d gotten him back just before his head could irreparably exsanguinate and they grew his ass back, hadn’t they?

In fact, decapitation was looking a lot better than being chained to a rock with high tide coming in. The water was lapping at her ankles now, and she felt a stinging sensation in her toes—the predatory _ka’ekhSs_ were already closing in. Dumb pea-brained sea-creatures, but not so dumb as to have figured out that there was usually a big hunk of warm, fresh meat waiting at this particular rock at high tide. The stinging turned into a sharp, stabbing pain and the water around her ankles grew warm, and she willed herself not to look down.

“No more fucking double-crosses,” she said out loud. If she survived this, she’d remember that; if she didn’t, well, the statement went on record via her neural lace to—

—To Iyana, in the end. “Sorry, Iyana,” she said to the water. She wondered how much of this Iyana would end up reviewing. Maybe she’d stop before it got to this point, and all that advice Yanari was giving to herself would be wasted. Still, a girl could dream.

They’d left her to handle the Te’Tench civil war on her own, against everyone’s better judgement. Sma had always said that SC would honour her choices, no matter how unfortunate they seemed. Well, she thought, if I’d known I was choosing simultaneous drowning and being nibbled to death by a bunch of fish no bigger than my little finger, maybe I wouldn’t have been so fucking stubborn.

The water was up to her knees. If she was lucky, the _ka’ekhSs_ would manage to open a big artery once they could reach her thighs and she’d bleed out. Assuming the Culture clotting treatments didn’t get in the way, anyway. Wouldn’t that be ironic.

Good thing I never had kids, she thought. She wondered if Iyana had. Iyana on her farm. What was it like, Yanari wondered, to till the fields, watch the crops grow, harvest. Let the field lie fallow, then repeat. And repeat again. With the possibility of that peace far beyond her own reach forever, she could finally understand, at least slightly, what Iyana had wanted.

She turned her face up to the blue sun and refused to blink.

 

Iyana closed the link so quickly that it gave her a headache. A terrible mistake; she should have, no, she had known better. She was never going to get those sensations out of her mind, not without some kind of help. She ran to the bathroom and vomited.

Later she found herself wishing that she’d sent a message to Yanari, at some point—at least one. If only to tell her that she was doing fine and the farm was thriving. That she’d had children and they were growing up healthy and sane. That despite their mutual misgivings in her strange beginning, things had, in their way, worked out.

The cube didn’t go back on the shelf this time; it went into the back of a drawer full of junk that didn’t get opened for another three years.

 

The harvest was in and she, Hallis, and the children and their families (Catalya was a mother now herself, and Derven had a fairly serious long-term partner) decided to go boating on the great blue lake that lay a few hours’ flight spinward. The days on the houseboat were slow and lazy; the children spent the days swimming, and slept heavily at night.

The second night, Hallis found Iyana sitting at the bench on the prow of the boat, holding Yanari’s cube between her fingers and spinning it gently.

“Talking to your friend?” he joked.

She laughed softly, shook her head. “No. Just thinking about her. She was a good agent. Really good.” She spun the cube a few more times. “You know, depending on how you look at it, I worked for SC for four years—or four plus the seventy Yanari had before we ... split. I didn’t live those years, but I remember them all. That was always the weird thing, you know—knowing that I had that past in me that I, in this body, hadn’t really lived. Probably why we never talked again. Too strange.”

She stopped spinning the cube and laid it flat in her palm. “I can see a bit of how she lived, how she thought. It’s weird—actual events aside, nothing she did was exactly surprising to me. I could recognise the rationales, the thought processes. It could have just as easily been me, working for SC all that time.”

Hallis sat down next to her, a worried look on his face. “You’re not going to join up.”

“No. No, hells no.” She leaned over and kissed him. “She had her life, Hallis, and I’m pretty sure she thought it was a damn good one. And I’ve got mine.”

She held the cube out over the deep blue water, and let it go.

**Author's Note:**

> “Tefwe had never liked the idea of being fully downloaded into something remote who got to play at being you. You stayed who you were but then the remote ‘you’ became somebody different, over time. The two of you—or more—could be re-integrated, but it was, she thought, an intrinsically messy process of frankly dubious morality.”  
> —Iain M. Banks, _The Hydrogen Sonata_
> 
> Many, many, many thanks to Kate Nepveu for helping me mold this into a proper story shape, and to innocentsmith for her feedback and support. And thanks also to mobiusloops for providing the [Gravenhurst song "Cities Beneath the Sea"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCUgAVO4zhA) that gave me the title.


End file.
